The Fight for Turtle Island

Description

This book is about an epic fight for Turtle Island that is invisible to most people. It is about memory, family, and the future of a livable planet.

This book is a culmination of several years of interviews between the late Aragorn! and a variety of Native people who are or were in anarchist circles. Mostly the conversations are in and about the intersections of, and tensions between, indigeneity and anarchism, through stories and experiences with anarchists.

Turtle Island is the land beneath our feet and it is the imaginary place that existed before colonization and that will exist when colonization is over. It is a true myth and an impossible dream. The fight for it requires warriors, tricksters, and medicine stronger than we know. How will we learn? Who will we do it with? Can anarchists help or are they just hurting this fight?

As a place that doesn’t exist (but did) Turtle Island is the type of no place usually referred to as myth. Perhaps this is true, perhaps Turtle Island is merely the fantastic story of a people who have since disappeared, or the story I’d prefer to tell about the place I live.

If I live in Turtle Island and not The United States of America, I can differentiate between my life and the life violently imposed upon me. I might be powerless to do much about it but it somehow feels important to assert that I would if I could, not an end-of-the-movie inspirational assertion about how We Are Powerful Together, but a personal declaration that I am on the side of a myth vs Manifest Destiny, that I believe in something-like-struggle if not the particulars of a specific fight, that I walk on the back of turtles and not on a spinning globe that’ll be discarded as soon as the powerful are ready to leave.

from the introduction

Featuring cover art by Gord Hill aka ZigZag